THE YAKHA: CULTURE, ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT IN ...

to submit my proposal to W S Atkins, Something he had found in his job
quite frequently was that if one left a problem alone for long enough
often it would go away. This seemed to have been the case here.
Ruffled feathers, real or imaginary, had become smooth; the director of
W S Atkins was said to be coming around to seeing the value of having
social researchers on his projects. I submitted my proposal and
arranged a meeting, which seemed to go quite well. The director
appeared to warm up considerably during a pub lunch, and afterwards he
said he could FAX a revised version of my proposal to the project office
in Kathmandu. However, when I spoke to him again after he had visited
Nepal he said there had been 'conceptual problems' between him and the
project manager and hence they had not discussed my proposal,
I did take the initiative of visiting one of the expatriate project
staff on her UK leave, however. It became obvious there had been
considerable misunderstandings about my role, fuelled by some malicious
gossip about me by other expatriates involved in forestry to whom I had
sent copies of my original ESRC 'CASS' proposal for information and
feedback. According to her, the project staff felt affronted that
everything had come through Sean Con1 in and that I had not made direct
contact with them earlier.''. She had also previously experienced
development experts and researchers coming and 'milking her' for
information about her community forestry work in Nepal without
subsequently acknowledging her help. While we left on good terms, I had
the distinct impression that I was embarking on fieldwork in a hornet's
nest. Living and doing fieldwork amongst the Yakha, I thought, would be
easy compared to doing fieldwork amongst the expatriate development
community in Nepal.